The Twente LINX backplane

. The design of a control system is not finished with the derivation of the necessary control algorithms. When the controller is implemented in a digital computer the system designer has to schedule all control and calculation tasks within the sampling interval of the system. Higher sampling frequencies often improve the system performance. On the other hand, more sophisticated control algorithms require more computing time thus reducing the obtainable sampling frequencies. Therefore, it is important to minimise the overhead of sampling and communication. This paper describes a transputer--based I/O system fulfilling this requirement and shows how the sampling with this system is done. Keywords. Link Based Backplane, Transputer Based I/O, Sampling, Parallel processing, Real-time Computer Systems, Control Engineering, Applications of Computers, Robot control, Transputers, Occam. 1. Introduction At the Control Laboratory of the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Twe..